Riker's Apocalypse (Book 1): The Promise

by Chesser, Shawn

  Steve-O said, “What if someone sees us get in the truck? And then says something to the police?”

  “I doubt if the BOLO is attached to the vehicle,” said Riker. “But just to be safe”—he regarded Steve-O—“seeing as how you and I stick out like sore thumbs, let’s have Tara sneak to the truck and pick us up around back. That way there’ll be less of a chance of someone seeing us pile into that big black beast.”

  Smiling at the prospect of maybe getting to practice a little subterfuge, Steve-O briskly rubbed his hands together.

  Tara returned carrying a wad of bills.

  Rising up from the booth, Riker leaned close to Tara. In a near whisper, he asked, “Has the money hit your account yet?”

  Shaking her head, she fanned the crisp hundreds out on the table.

  After a quick count, Riker said, “Fifteen hundred dollars?”

  “I’m a student living on a barista’s income.”

  “What about your tips?”

  “I only grabbed this week’s. Last week’s are at home in my underwear drawer.”

  Riker saw Steve-O turn away. From his vantage nearly two heads above the older man, it was clear a touch of color was rising up his neck and beginning to migrate to his cheeks.

  “And you didn’t bring them, why?

  “You were rushing me, Lee. That’s why.”

  Riker told Tara his plan, shouldered his bag, then set off towards the saloon doors with Steve-O on his heels.

  “What’s the plan, Stan?” asked Steve-O.

  “Just follow me,” said Riker. “I’ve already reconnoitered our egress.”

  “What?”

  “I know where the back door is. And there’s no windows in the bar.”

  “Good thinking,” said Steve-O as he raised an arm to parry the swinging doors and followed Riker into the gloom.

  The back door was near the pair of bathrooms exclusive to the bar patrons. Boxes filled with empty longneck bottles were stacked beside the door, their folded-over tops nearly reaching to the panic bar. Riker was still processing what he’d just seen on the televisions when he pushed through the back door. As he stood there walking his gaze around the lot filled mostly with big rigs, he realized that what troubled him the most about Fox’s coverage of the disaster was how the shiny tower still burned and the camera recording the conflagration was doing so from the same distance and angle as it had been during his first foray into the bar. Hell, on 9/11 the footage was coming in live almost instantly from news crews aloft in helicopters as well as numerous teams set up on the ground around Manhattan. The stations even cut to different feeds and, as hard as it was to wrap one’s mind around the happenings of that awful day, did their best to describe what they were seeing. So if this was terrorism, why such a dearth of live coverage?

  They didn’t have to wait long for Tara to pull up in the SUV. Riker couldn’t help but chuckle. Tara looked like a twelve-year-old perched up there behind the steering wheel. He opened the front passenger door. With a sweep of one arm and a slight dip, he offered shotgun to Steve-O.

  “Nope,” said Steve-O, “I enjoy being chamfered.” He smiled and impersonated Riker. Though the move looked more like a curtsy than an act of chivalry, Riker took him up on the offer, swinging his bionic in first, then climbing the rest of the way in with the aid of the pair of grab bars. He closed the door and felt the rig begin to move before he could go for the belt. As he got ahold of the buckle, inexplicably all forward momentum ceased and Tara was rolling the transmission into Park.

  Riker regarded her with a stunned expression. “Want me to drive?” he asked.

  “Don’t patronize me, Lee. I’m driving until we turn in for the night.”

  He scanned the surroundings. They were parked in the shadow of a dark brown Volvo tractor hooked to a tandem trailer emblazoned with the brown and gold UPS logo and sporting the tagline: What can Brown do for you?

  Dead ahead was the Iron Pan, only they were viewing it from the east. Both the double-doors out front and the single windowless door out back were visible from the hide. They’d be able to see any vehicles rolling in off the frontage road as well as anyone going in or coming out of the building.

  “What’s going on then?” queried Riker.

  “Just like you went into the bar on a little unannounced recon trip”—Riker slowly panned left and fixed Steve-O with a blank stare—“I’m taking it upon myself to see if we have just gained a tail.”

  “Someone’s been watching reruns of 24. Newsflash, Tara. I’m no Jack Bauer and you’re about as far from his sidekick Chloe as our aptly named waitress.”

  “That show was very intense,” said Steve-O.

  Riker nodded in agreement.

  Tara smiled and said, “I’m all you got Mr. I carry an old-ass flip-phone. Take me or leave me.”

  “Swear jar.”

  In unison, Riker and Tara told Steve-O to butt out so they could get this out of their system.

  “Thank God I’m an only,” said Steve-O. “While you two fight, I’ll keep an eye out for Johnny.”

  The Riker siblings went quiet for a second.

  Riker asked, “Johnny?”

  “That’s what I’m calling the soldiers in black.”

  Riker shrugged his wide, sloping shoulders. “Very fitting.”

  Tara said, “We’ll just give the recon a few minutes, okay? I want to know either way.”

  Riker said, “Remember how well our recon of the high school went?”

  “That’s different,” remarked Tara. “We were going to them. And we had no idea men with guns were waiting.”

  “You have a point, Sis. However, this won’t be definitive either way if they don’t show. Then it’ll be in the back of our minds pecking away like a bird after suet.” He paused for a second. “On the other hand—”

  Tara said, “What’s on your mind?”

  “There’s at least twenty pissed-off truckers in there who aren’t getting to go where they need to. Some of them are drinking. Might be fun seeing the Feds or whoever shows up looking for us run into that kind of meat grinder.” He flashed a lopsided smile.

  Steve-O said, “My money is on the truckers. Anyone seen B.J. and the Bear?”

  Riker and Tara shook their heads.

  “Trucker and a monkey,” said Steve-O. “Nice truck, too.”

  Riker regarded Tara. After a short pause during which he was staring at the truck stop restaurant, he tapped a finger on the clock in the dash. “You have fifteen minutes, Sis.”

  “Thirty,” she countered.

  “Twenty.”

  “Okay, okay, hard-ass. Twenty it is.”

  He nodded. “And not a minute longer.”

  Chapter 52

  “Your twenty minutes is up,” said Riker. “Let’s go.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought it’d be like the movies. They’d come swooping in lights a blazing.”

  “Better that than what I was thinking,” said Riker. “I was afraid black helicopters would fast rope a cleanup crew of specialists. Hood all of us up and take us to a CIA black site.”

  “Really?”

  “No. Just pulling your leg. The way the Johnnies opened fire on the people in the van says more than you may know. Pandora’s Box is wide open. They’re no longer in containment mode. That back there … that was an act of survival. Those Johnnies were in self-preservation mode. I’ve seen civilians packed into passenger cars speed toward a checkpoint and not stop even after warning shots were fired. Left the guards no choice but to light them up. ‘Us or them’ is the attitude you adopt real quickly once you’re dropped into a war zone.”

  Tara asked, “The civilians?”

  “Every one of them died. Nine, I believe. They were running from Saddam’s former henchmen.”

  “Baathists,” said Steve-O. “Bad hombres. Newsflash … I like the History Channel, too.”

  “Correct. Later it was Sunni killing Shia and vice versa. Amidst all that Al Qaeda was going nu
ts with their bombing campaigns.” He rubbed his temples. The fire was back and spreading to his shoulders. “Their civil war was hell to be around.”

  Envisioning another team of Johnnies manning a roadblock somewhere along their eventual path to wherever Lee was taking them—No, wherever Mom is taking us—Tara fixed a watery gaze on her brother. “I lied,” she said. “I’d feel better if you drove.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive.” She opened her door, letting in the caustic nose of diesel exhaust hanging in the air. On the way out the door, she said, “I just want to navigate from now on.”

  Riker didn’t want to allow her any time to change her mind, a thing she was wont to do at the drop of a hat. So he shouldered open his door and clambered out.

  They met near the tailgate and exchanged a quick hug and a second round of heartfelt apologies.

  Riker wasted no time getting them moving north again. Instead of backtracking the short distance to the interstate, he turned onto the frontage road heading back toward I-69 and then hung a sharp right on the first county road he came to. They stayed to the county road northbound for several miles, seeing the paralleling interstate now and again through breaks in the trees.

  Closing fast with a four-way crossing, Riker asked Tara to check the navigation unit again. At about the same time Tara leaned over to press the appropriate pixelated button on the control unit, a series of instantly recognizable tones sounded from within one of her pockets.

  Ignoring her iPhone’s Siren’s call, Tara brought the map up on the display. When she depressed the + icon a half-dozen times, the map of the surrounding area recalculated for the first time since they took the Suburban from the high school parking lot hours ago.

  “We’ve got GPS coverage now,” she crowed. “And my phone just received a shit-ton of updates.”

  Riker said, “That’s what those sounds were, huh. I thought maybe the navigation unit was dying entirely.”

  “Nope. It’s working now.” She looked away from the display. Fingers poised over a QWERTY keyboard rendered digitally on the screen, she said, “Okay. Hit me with the city and state we’re taking Mom.”

  “Good try,” said Steve-O. “I saw that one coming from Albuquerque.” Voice an octave higher, he added, “Swear jar needs to be fed.”

  Tara turned toward the back seat and stuck her tongue stuck out at Steve-O.

  “You almost had me,” said Riker.

  “Really?”

  Laughing, Riker shook his head. “Not even close.”

  Back to fiddling with the nav-unit, Tara said, “Go left here. It’ll connect up with the interstate.” She hit the – key until the interstate was a thick green line cutting the rectangular screen in half vertically. “If we’re to believe the color code, I-69 is lightly traveled right now.”

  “Smooth sailing, then,” said Riker. “Let’s hope it’s accurate.” He steered left, then took a hand off the wheel long enough to jab a finger at the smartphone balanced on Tara’s thigh. “Anything from the lawyer hit your inbox?”

  She thumbed the screen for a moment. When she looked up, the expression she wore was not what Riker wanted to see.

  “Relax, Lee. I bet we’ll get the confirmation emails tomorrow. Banks keep banker’s hours. Always have, always will.”

  Fishing his phone from a pocket, Riker said, “I want you to check mine.”

  She took the phone, flipped it open, and peered down at the screen.

  Seeing this, Steve-O said, “My dad had one of those. Ten years ago.”

  “That’s about how old it is,” replied Riker. He craned and saw that the navigation computer had correctly gauged the flow of traffic. It was very light moving north, with maybe one or two vehicles flitting by every few seconds.

  The traffic light gods were smiling on them and Riker cruised through on a green and took the on-ramp to merge onto I-69 North. He slid the black SUV behind a white minivan, quickly matched its speed, then transitioned to the fast lane, his eyes taking a half-second inventory of the vehicles reflected back at him in the rearview mirror. Save for a white SUV in his lane a third of a mile back, there seemed to be nothing to worry about. The gold Prius one lane over and ten car lengths back was not the kind of ride he’d expect to see one of the men in black choosing to use as a pursuit vehicle. No range and no get up and go.

  “Now that you got that thing working,” said Riker, “why don’t you plug in Akron as our destination.”

  The mere mention of the birthplace of Alcoholics Anonymous made Tara sit up straight. Fixing Riker with a side-eyed look, she said, “Are we driving all the way to New York and spreading Mom’s ashes at Stepping Stones?”

  Riker kept his eyes on the road and made no reply.

  “Dad was the alcoholic, not her. Makes no sense to me at all.” Tara went quiet for a beat, hand poised near the colorful display. Finally she made a face and said, “Why would she want her last earthly remains to be there for all of eternity?”

  “Dad was a brilliant man, Tara. Sure, he had his problems with the drink—”

  “You can’t argue the fact that Dad did his best work after he got sober. I guess Stepping Stones makes sense now that I think about it. Hell, A.A. saved his life. Saved Mom’s, too, in a roundabout way.”

  Sort of saved mine, too, thought Riker, as he looked up and noticed the white SUV had halved the distance to his bumper rather quickly. He was about to inform Tara that his decision to go to Akron was purely one of economics, because surely a night’s lodging for three would be much easier on the wallet there than in Cleveland, when red and blue lights behind the SUV’s black grill suddenly lit up behind them.

  “We may not even make it to Akron,” said Riker. “Make sure the pump gun is loaded and hand it over.”

  “How exactly do I do that, Lee?”

  “The handle up front is attached to the pump. Should be a slide release. Some kind of button behind the trigger guard you’ll need to press to get it moving. Keeping your finger away from the trigger, push the button and slowly pull the pump toward you. There’s a rectangular window on one side where the spent shells are ejected. When that window is open, you’ll either see a shell in there or you’ll see an empty chamber.”

  She took the gun from the bag. Looked it over for a brief second. Satisfied she had her bearings, she placed her left hand atop the gun near the rear sight, depressed the nub by the trigger guard, and racked the pump back a couple of inches.

  Riker checked the mirror. The SUV was now only two car lengths back.

  “What do you see?” he asked.

  “It’s empty.”

  “Then jack a round into the chamber.”

  Apparently jack had a universal meaning to the Riker siblings. No need on his part to elaborate, because Tara pulled back hard on the pump and slammed it forward with authority.

  She handed the Mossberg over butt first, keeping the barrel aimed at the floorboards. “You’re going to blow a cop away?”

  “Only if they’re in bed with the Johnnies.”

  “What about the Guard soldier at the high school? You let him live.”

  The white SUV was now on the Suburban’s bumper. The Prius had fallen back and was growing smaller in the wing mirror as it came to a stop in the breakdown lane.

  “Better to be judged by twelve, than carried by six.”

  “I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean, Lee.” She glanced at Steve-O in the back seat. He had somehow acquired the iPod Tara had lifted from the kid at the shelter. A pair of earbuds were jammed in his ears and his head was bobbing to a beat she couldn’t hear. Parking her gaze on Riker, she said, “You better do something. That truck is about to drive up your tailpipe.”

  “And the butt jokes keep a comin’,” said Riker as he bumped the signal stalk up and slowly drifted them out of the fast lane. In the rearview he saw Steve-O look up from the tiny screen for a second, flick his eyes to the road ahead, then go back to whatever he was doing.

 
As the white SUV overtook them, the less than aerodynamic Suburban was buffeted by the wall of wind pushing ahead of what Riker guessed was a Chevrolet Tahoe.

  Head facing forward, hands gripping the wheel white-knuckle-tight at the proper ten and two, Riker did all he could to appear uninterested while scrutinizing the vehicle filling up his left-side peripheral vision. First thing he noted was the yard-long Department of Homeland Security decal gracing the right-front fender. As the Tahoe crept forward, Riker’s eye was drawn to the cobalt blue stripe cutting its rear flank diagonally. Then, as the vehicle slowed to match the Suburban’s speed, Riker recognized that the passenger was a woman in uniform. And that she was shaking her head side to side and looking in his direction. He saw from the corner of his eye a glimmer of movement he knew was her mouthing something completely unintelligible to him due to the oblique viewing angle.

  The Homeland rig kept pace for a long three-count, during which both vehicles traveled several hundred feet of I-69. A full second of the woman’s eyes boring holes into his head was all Riker could take before his gaze was drawn to her face. Then, as if a puppet master was behind the curtain and working unseen strings, his head was swiveling left and he was staring her square in the face.

  In the end Riker was glad his resolve had crumbled. Because instead of comprehending those mouthed words as Pull over, now or Yes, I’m certain it’s them he actually understood what she was saying word for word as she continued berating him across the four-foot divide.

  “Eff off, lady. I’m not driving like a grandpa,” is what he mouthed back as the Homeland vehicle pulled away.

  Brake lights flared red as the sparse traffic ahead noted the strobing grill lights and began to congregate in the right lanes.

  Once the Tahoe was nearly lost to the horizon, Riker steered into the fast lane and matted the accelerator. His lone goal: Keep the retreating flashers in sight.

  Chapter 53

  Twenty minutes removed from the ten-second encounter with Homeland Security, Riker’s nerves were no longer sparking like live-wires on a wet street, the tightness in his shoulders and neck had slackened, and his laser-like focus on the speeding SUV was waning.